General Politics XII World • Page 405

100k was always stuck in my head like everyone else our age, so when I finally got a job making that on my own a few years ago I was like...well this doesn't feel the same as it did back then.

kaitie got laid off after we made one (1) mortgage payment after buying our house in March lol. We also had our wedding last month and thankfully spent less than 5k for the entire thing. Before she was laid off we were clearing 200k, which was comfortable in Denver proper. With her unemployment it's closer to 160k and it's been tight.

My work does 8% matching 401(a) contributions so based on the calculator app on their website, it says I'm on track for retirement but who fucking knows at this point

 

all kidding aside, my adult life I have always worked at fairly well-paying jobs and have consistently done a lot of overtime. when I was younger and single, for me it really was just looking at where I was spending it on dumb things and tightening that up and being much smarter and more strategic about it.

kids blow all of it out of the fucking water tho

 

This has also been my experience with every milestone # or new raise I've ever got, you think if only ... and then after getting there are like, hmm, what about the next bump. I sometimes have to remind myself I used to dream and pray about "one day" being exactly where I am right now. That this was at one point the very dream and goal.

This sucks so much. I'm sorry. Literal nightmare fuel kind of thing. Before we moved that was a big red line for me was making sure our mortgage was something we could pay on one of our salaries if we had to. I hope she finds a new job and you can get back to that ... clears throat ... mile high life.

 

A little bit dependent on where you live. Using MA as an example, you need a take home of ~50,000 just for your mortgage payment alone. So like factoring car loans, daycare, student loans, utilities, groceries etc etc 100k can go pretty fast out here. Obviously no one making 100k or owning a house should be crying poverty, I’m just talking about a sense of “made it.”

 

yeah its wild how much things start to grow if you contribute regularly, even if its a small amount, and let the interest do the rest.

 

Yeah but have you considered my recommendation to not eat avocado toast, AND to not have a car loan, kid, or student loan?

Dual income 180-200k for a family (especially with a kid), I can get that, but I was reading that first tweet as though people thought they, individually, needed to be making 200k+ to feel financially successful. I still find that extremely high, I think I consider myself successful all in all, have a mortgage, bills, know the monthly costs of living ... and I do not make that. Like the idea of me individually bringing in 200k a year feels like so much extra compared to our budget I do not know what I would do with it. Not saying I don't want to try and find out! But I also hope people that are pulling in 150+ are doing good things with their money and not just out there feeling stressed that they're not financially successful or overbuying homes or something, I dunno. I wasn't making that in my 20s and 30s, thought I was doing alright. But I guess I've been constantly making (pretty decent in my head) money since I was like ... 18? ... I'm almost 42 now, so almost 24 years of saving ... the long game ... and not overspending young has paid off.

I am just still a little mindblown at the idea of people thinking they need to make that number, again if it's individually.

 

Yes, I have tried not having a car loan and I don’t like avocado toast.

I’m currently interviewing for roles where the salary gets up to like 170k and like holy fuck would that be a life changer. The 50k/annual mortgage we pay is currently paying for a 1,200 square foot ranch out in farmland so, for us to be anywhere north of the city where we want to be, I’m gonna need to land one of these jobs lol

 

What's that ... like ... $4,100 a month for a mortgage?

So, aiming for the 30% rule ... that's ... ~164k for a dual family income to be on the safe side.

That mentally tracks for me thinking a dual family income of 200k would be "financial successful;" to spend 30% on their 4k a month mortgage, buy other stuff, etc.

Also, a mortgage over 4k in Oregon would get you quite a bit more, and definitely don't look at like some of the Texas or Kansas houses that pop up on my Instagram that are like 6,000 square feet for like 380k.

 

I had to click to see too many what and wow what a reveal lol

 

Echo the 100K sentiment…if I were making 100K by myself I’d be psyched.

me and my wife are both teachers so I think combined last year we were in the ~130K range, we have one kid, a mortgage payment, one car payment, one student loan payment, and until this past June we had a childcare payment. I would say we live comfortably, but our biggest advantages have been 1. She graduated with zero in student loans because her parents paid for it, and because of this had like 20-25K in savings by her mid 20s, 2. My student loan payment is small because I only graduated with 21K in debt. So not having that student loan pitfall helps us a ton. Combine that with me being generally on top of finances, I.e. paying attention to mortgage rates so knowing when a good time to buy and refinance was, paying attention to home prices, etc, and it’s set us up pretty good. Our mortgage payment is low with a 2.875 interest rate, the one car payment we have, we bought at what i think was close to the bottom of the car market in spring 2020, so the car payment is only $170 a month or something like that for an 2017 Outback with all the bells/whistles/add ons, my student loan payment even before the SAVE plan was under $200 if I wanted to pay the minimum (I usually pay more), and we both have pensions so aren’t throwing income into a 401K (yet, that’s next this year)…so thanks to all that, I’d say we live “comfortably”. We definitely need to tighten the belt so to speak and cut back on some shit (like eating takeout) as we have baby #2 on the way and will pick up childcare payments again in a year. But generally we are comfortable, can pay for one week vacation at the beach every summer, etc.

All that to say that, if we were making 200K a year? Fuck. Definitely would buy similar size house in a nicer neighbor (and ours isn’t a bad neighborhood!)and happily pay the extra $1000 a month the mortgage would be, and still have plenty left over lol

 

read some of the comments to see what others said and if anyone echoed my wtf!

this comment stuck out though because i think about it a lot.

first year of college: 9/11
right after graduating college: housing crisis

 

this alone makes me hate you more than every lib post combined just for the record

 

And yeah I grew up having very little extras and under the idea that we could lose our place to live if my mom suddenly lost her job, we were quite literally paycheck to paycheck, especially once we got forced out of our rental house when I was 15. That existence as a kid definitely shaped my being generally on top of finances now. We definitely do frivolous spending but if we had 200K instead of the ~130K we have a year now, pretty sure like Jason said I’d prob be plowing a lot of that into a retirement account of some sort lol. Wouldn’t know what to do with the extra. Though I guess a lot of it could go towards trips/experiences/etc for the kids, things I didn’t get growing up like music lessons or summer camps or etc

 

Thread is giving me lots of financial anxiety today

 

i need to landscape the side of my house in a year or so. that's where the extra money would go.

this is a good time to plug: chorus.fm/support

 

My experience has been that every time my income jumps my expenses do too. It does feel like I’m at a point where if my income jumped up significantly again I could really start saving, but I’m also sure something would just cause my expenses to jump again.
Also my education is the reason I make good money but I had to get buried in student loans to get there, and those are constantly keeping my savings down.

 

Right but like I said, the $4,100/month is for a small house that can’t fit a family in a tiny farm town. Bump that number up closer to $5,500/month for any decent-desirable location (for MA people I’m talking like Wilmington or Chelmsford, not Needham or Newton)

Then borderline double it for daycare costs in high CoL areas, which can get ridiculously expensive.

 

Hahaha….Once I got out of my initial stupor of holy fuck about the pandemic early on, in clicked in my brain like “oh wait interest rates are probably lower now” so I started following it and once it dropped below 3% I immediately called our broker who got us the og mortgage and said hey we wanna refinance let’s make that happen.

We were at 4.25 which funnily enough was like the peak of the Trump years interest rates I think. I tried getting my wife to buy when they were still in the 3s but she dragged her feet and we ended up north of 4 by the time she was ready. but had we had one in the 3s, the refinance to 2.875 probably wouldn’t have been worth it, so…I guess she was right as usual

 

Have you all considered just dying

 

Every couple of days but my life insurance is only 70k

 

geez you need to get that bumped up

 

That'd be about 220k a year at 30%, again that tracks to me as being a financially successful double income family. The survey read to to me like people thought they needed to make that, alone, to be financially successful. And your scenarios are reinforcing my view. (And making me a lot happier with my mortgage to be honest.)

(Aside: if you're reading this and making 220k alone, don't spend over 5k a month on a mortgage early in your life. Save that shit.)

 

If I get one of these jobs it would put us around 250k hhi and I think then I might feel a bit more comfortable. As of now I don’t really feel like there’s much room to save or contribute to my 401k or things like that. Certainly not room for an extravagance like…gasp…a vacation lol

 

I don't know if I want to look at today's rate, if it's lower than what we locked in I'll be annoyed ... ok ... fuck ...

Oh, it's almost a full point higher. Not annoyed at all.

Your sub three is still devil music to me.

 

lol I appreciate it, it's fine (so far). She's getting calls for interviews, just hasn't been the top pick yet. It's a numbers game in this market right now. Feels very recession-y even though the CHARTS say otherwise. Lots of "ghost jobs," being left in the dark, recruiters reaching out and then ghosting, etc.

I'm going to kill you